How I Met Your Father

This is a conversation that happens fairly often. Recently it happened again, with a different set of characters.

“He seems like a decent guy. So what’s the problem?” we ask, after she tells us about a boy.

“He’s younger than me!” she sighs.

“So? Age does not matter,” someone else points out.

This is the moment when I would then pull out the trump card, the final argument that would win our case. “My mom is ten years older than my dad.”

After this statement, the reaction is almost always the same: “Ten?!!” Eyes wide, jaws dropped in amazement.

“How did they meet?” they ask, something beyond curiosity blazing behind their eyes.

I then launch into a tale that happened three decades ago.

My mom always starts off the story in her college years. She wanted to be a nurse, to go abroad. Her mother had different ideas and forced her to become an engineer. She was bad at Math but managed to pass the board exams. How, I don’t know. She eventually found a job in her hometown, Bukidnon, but due to a reshuffling of items (or something to that effect), her position became redundant and she lost her job. She found out from an old friend that there was an open position but at a place far away. Faced with no choice, she packed up and transferred.

Six months later, her boss asked her to attend a seminar. She didn’t want to go, but her boss told her: “Go! Who knows, you might meet your future husband there!” So she went. And met a young chap with a good sense of humor. She thought he was too good looking and too young to be interested in her. He liked older women and found her incessant chatter to be charming. They got married three months later. She was 37 years old then.

“If I had become a nurse and gone abroad, or if I hadn’t lost my job and stayed in Bukidnon, then I wouldn’t have met your father,” she always tells me and my brother. “Then I wouldn’t have had you.”

I’ve heard the story so many times that I’ve become immune to it but my friends tell me: “Wow that’s so inspiring! It gives me hope!”

And I realize that I always turn to romance novels and movies and other people’s stories for inspiration, not realizing that the only inspiration I need is right under my nose. Right inside me, actually. The fact that I exist.

Someday I’ll meet the guy who will make me see how all the different pieces of my life fall into place. The one who will make me feel like I’m reading Harry Potter book 7, the one who will make me go, “Oh that’s why that happened!”

So the moral of my mom’s story? (1) Age or looks don’t matter. Nor do any other traits. (2) Catastrophes can be blessings in disguise. And most importantly – (3) GO. Just go. Who knows, you might meet your future husband there.